Staff Directory
- Pronouns she/they
- Title
- UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- Literature Department
- Website
- Mail Stop Literature Department
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Chicana/o Studies; Archives, Archival Practices; Death/Mortality Studies; Epistemology; LGBT+; Critical Theory
Research Interests
- Latina/Chicana Feminism
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- Hauntology
- Archival Studies
- Death Studies
- Late 20th & 21st Century Latinx Literature
Biography, Education and Training
Brenda Selena Lara (she/they/ella) is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department. She received her doctoral degree from UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies with an emphasis in Gender Studies and Experimental Critical Theory. Born and raised in South Los Angeles, her upbringing influences her historical, theoretical, and literary research analyzing LGBTQ+ Latinxs’ lives, knowledge, and deaths. Brenda Lara’s current book project “Turning to the Ghosts” examines queer Latinx scholars’ untimely deaths in academia. Her research has been awarded the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship. Brenda Lara’s in-press publications include "Ciguanabas, Refugees, and Other Hauntings: Salvadoran Women's Epistemic Hauntings Across Temporality, Space, and Borderlands" in Monsters & Saints: LatIndigenous Landscapes and Spectral Storytelling and “Cubans, Queers, and Quinces: Undressing Sexualities, Borderlands, and Feminist Rituals Netflix’s ‘One Day at a Time” in Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies.
Honors, Awards and Grants
- University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
- The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Inter-University Program for Latino Research Mellon Dissertation Fellowship
- UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship
